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Crosswords

My obsession with crosswords goes back a long way...

One year, while I was still in primary school, I spent the entire summer holidays creating a dictionary to help me beat a friend at school in solving the daily newspaper cross word puzzle. (Tragically, when school resumed I discovered that my friend had moved on to the Rubik's Cube and glory eluded me.)

When my partner and I were moving house recently, I came across my first draft of my home made dictionary in an old trunk in our store room. When I get a chance, I'll track it down again and show you a page or two.

If you share my enthusiasm for this most famous of all word puzzles, you might be able to relate to some of these private confessions...

I had to read William Golding's novel 'Rights of Passage'
twice. First to create a Nautical Glossary, and then to see what the story was about.

To kill time spent in traffic, I once memorized the spelling of all the letters in the Greek, Hebrew, and Phoenician alphabets.

All my attempts to study Islam have resulted in a long list of Islamic Terms for Crossword Players.

As a technical writer, I once managed to sneak a list of unusual plurals, called More than one Platypus, into a computer manual.

Over the years, some of my word lists have disappeared in bookmarks, buried hundreds of pages deep in tomes I no longer even remember owning. Many more were lost forever as long-neglected storage boxes disintegrated in damp basements.

These pages will not only put an end to this wastefulness, but will make the fruits of my labours available to other word buffs out there. Like you!